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Epitalon 10 mg
Peptide Library · Profile
Epitalon 10 mg
Epitalon is famous for a trial that reduced mortality in elderly patients over six years. That trial was real, it was double-blind and placebo-controlled — and it did not use Epitalon. It used a crude extract of cow pineal glands. Everything on this page follows from that one fact.
Molecular weight390.4Da · Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly
Amino acids4among the smallest peptides sold
Human trials of this peptideNonerandomised or otherwise
Human pharmacokineticsNoneno measurement in any species
The short version
Plain English first. Everything below this section is the same material with the sources, the numbers and the caveats attached.
What it is
A four-amino-acid peptide — among the smallest sold anywhere — associated with longevity claims.
What has actually been measured
The famous six-year mortality trial was real: double-blind, placebo-controlled, in elderly patients. It did not use Epitalon. It used a crude extract of cow pineal glands.
What has not been measured
Epitalon itself. No human trial, randomised or otherwise, and no pharmacokinetic measurement in any species.
What most people get wrong
Attributing that mortality result to this peptide. Everything on this page follows from that one substitution — an extract of a gland, quoted as though it were a synthetic four-amino-acid peptide.
What Epitalon is, and what it is not
Epitalon is a synthetic tetrapeptide: alanine, glutamate, aspartate, glycine. Four residues, 390 daltons. It is one of the smallest things in this catalogue and it carries one of the largest reputations, almost all of which belongs to something else.
| Epitalon — this product | Epithalamin | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A defined synthetic tetrapeptide | A crude extract of bovine pineal glands |
| Composition | One molecule, Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly | A mixture of many peptides, not fully characterised |
| Molecular weight | 390.4 Da | Not a single value — it is a mixture |
| Registered as a medicine | Nowhere | USSR, 1990 — Ministry of Health Order No. 250 |
| The famous mortality trials | No | Yes — all of them |
CAS 307297-39-8 for the free peptide; 307297-40-1 for the acetate salt. Vendor certificates quote either, so both are worth recognising.
Epitalon was designed from the extract. It was not isolated from it.
The relationship is real but looser than the marketing implies: Epitalon was synthesised on the basis of the amino acid composition of Epithalamin. It is one defined molecule built to resemble part of an undefined mixture.
That distinction decides what transfers. A mixture of unknown composition and a single tetrapeptide are not interchangeable by mass, and no study has ever bridged them — no dose equivalence, no pharmacokinetic comparison, nothing. Every human result attributed to Epitalon was produced by injecting a different substance.
How it is said to work
Epitalon is described as a pineal regulator: restoring melatonin rhythm, normalising the neuroendocrine axis, and — the claim that made its name — switching telomerase back on in cells that have stopped expressing it.
The telomerase finding is real, and it is a cell culture finding
Khavinson and colleagues, 2003, in Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine. Verbatim from the abstract:
"Addition of Epithalon peptide in telomerase-negative human fetal fibroblast culture induced expression of the catalytical subunit, enzymatic activity of telomerase, and telomere elongation, which can be due to reactivation of telomerase gene in somatic cells and indicates the possibility of prolonging life span of a cell population and of the whole organism."
Human fetal fibroblasts, in a dish. That is the entire basis. Note the wording of the conclusion — "indicates the possibility" — which is the authors being more careful than most of the people who cite them.
There is now an independent replication, and it is not entirely comfortable
Until 2025 essentially all Epitalon research came from one group in St Petersburg. That changed: a team at Brunel University London and the Royal Brompton, with no connection to the original researchers, tested Epitalon across six human cell lines and reported telomerase activation and telomere lengthening — roughly a four-fold telomerase increase in normal fibroblasts.
Two things about that paper belong on this page. The journal issued a correction stating that the wrong figures appeared in Figures 1, 2 and 3, which are the figures carrying the numerical results. And the cell lines included breast cancer lines, where Epitalon also lengthened telomeres and activated an alternative telomere-maintenance pathway. More on that in the safety section, because it is the most important unresolved question about this compound.
Nobody has measured a human being's telomeres after taking Epitalon
You will read that they have. We went looking for the study. The claim traces to a slide presentation on the lead researcher's own website — not to a paper, not to a journal, not to peer review. There is no published in-vivo human telomere or telomerase measurement for this compound. If somebody tells you there is, ask them for the citation.
Pharmacokinetics
There is none. Not thin, not disputed — absent.
We could find no measured plasma concentration, half-life, Cmax, AUC or bioavailability figure for Epitalon in a human being or in any animal, in any language we could access. The 2025 comprehensive review of the compound contains no ADME section because there is nothing to put in one.
What can be said is pharmacological reasoning rather than measurement, and we label it that way: a four-residue peptide with no protective modifications is the kind of molecule plasma peptidases clear very quickly. That is an expectation, not a finding. No measurement exists to confirm it, and none exists to contradict it either.
You will see claims that Epitalon is orally active because it "resists hydrolysis." The traceable basis for that is a rat study in which 100 micrograms was given by mouth for a month. No bioavailability was measured. That is not an oral bioavailability finding; it is a description of what was done to some rats.
What the evidence shows
This is the section that matters. The evidence is genuinely interesting and it is about a different substance.
The trials everyone cites
Khavinson and Morozov, 2003, in Neuro Endocrinol Lett: 266 elderly and older persons followed over six to eight years, across sites in St Petersburg and Kiev. Randomised by stratification, double-blind, placebo-controlled. Six-year mortality in the St Petersburg arm ran 81.8% on placebo against 45.8% on the pineal preparation, and 20.0% in the group receiving a combined course annually for six years.
Those are striking numbers from a properly designed trial. Here is the paper's own definition of what was injected:
"Epithalamin is a polypeptide complex extracted from the pineal gland."
The paper does not mention Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly anywhere. A later follow-up of a separate cohort — 39 treated against 40 controls, six courses over three years, fifteen years of observation — reported 66.7% alive against 40%. Also the extract. Also randomised, though that one was not placebo-controlled: the comparison group received standard care.
What exists for the synthetic peptide
No randomised trial. No placebo-controlled trial. No dose-ranging study. No Phase 1.
The single human report we could find is a 2002 paper from the same group claiming that Epitalon improved retinal condition in retinitis pigmentosa "in 90% of the cases." We could not obtain its methods: no patient count, no dose, no route, no control group is described in anything retrievable. We are mentioning it so that this page is not accused of pretending it does not exist, and we are not going to build anything on it.
The replication problem, stated plainly
Until 2025, every study of Epitalon and Epithalamin — animal, cell and human — came from one research group. Roughly half the literature is in Russian and has never been translated. The Brunel work described above is the first independent laboratory replication of the telomerase effect, and it is in cell culture.
That is not an accusation. Single-group literatures are common in small fields and are not automatically wrong. It is a reason to hold the conclusions loosely, and it is a fact the reader is entitled to before spending money.
Reconstitution
A 10 mg vial. Epitalon is usually run at whole-milligram doses, so the useful volumes are small:
| Bacteriostatic water | Concentration | 1 unit (U-100) = | 5 mg draw |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 mL | 10 mg/mL | 100 mcg | 50 units · 0.50 mL |
| 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 mcg | 100 units · 1.00 mL |
| 3 mL | 3.33 mg/mL | 33.3 mcg | 150 units · 1.50 mL |
10 mg ÷ 1 mL = 10 mg/mL, so one U-100 unit carries 100 mcg and a 5 mg draw is half a syringe. At 2 mL the same dose fills a whole 1 mL syringe; at 3 mL it needs two. Unless you have a reason to go dilute, 1 mL keeps a whole-milligram dose inside one comfortable injection.
The arithmetic that catches people out
At the commonly circulated 5 mg a day, a 10 mg vial is two days. A twenty-day course is therefore ten vials, not the two or three people tend to buy first. That is not a recommendation to run twenty days — see the protocols section for where that number comes from — but if you are planning any course, work it out before you start rather than halfway through. The supply planner will do it for whatever protocol you are actually following.
Reported protocols
The dosing convention for Epitalon has a traceable origin, and tracing it is uncomfortable.
The figure in circulation is 5 to 10 mg a day for a course of 10 to 20 days, repeated two or three times a year. That maps almost exactly onto the trial regimens — and the trial regimens are Epithalamin.
| Regimen | Substance actually used |
|---|---|
| 10 mg intramuscularly daily for 10 days, 100 mg per course, repeated annually | Epithalamin extract |
| 10 mg per dose, 5 doses at 2 to 3 day intervals, 50 mg per course, every 5 to 6 months | Epithalamin extract |
| 10 mg in 2 mL saline intramuscularly, every 3 days, 5 injections per course, 6 month intervals | Epithalamin extract |
| 5–10 mg/day, 10–20 days, 2–3 times a year | Epitalon, by inheritance from the rows above |
The dose changed substance without changing number
"Every five to six months" became "two to three times a year." "10 mg daily for 10 days" became "5 to 10 mg for 10 to 20 days." The schedule was transplanted from a crude bovine extract onto a synthetic tetrapeptide on the strength of the two things having similar names.
No dose of synthetic Epitalon has ever been established in a human being. There is no dose-ranging study, no pharmacokinetic bridge, and no equivalence argument connecting a milligram of undefined pineal extract to a milligram of a defined four-residue peptide. Label this one honestly in your own head: it is convention, and it is convention borrowed from a different molecule.
Storage
Lyophilised, sealed, cold, dark and dry, this is a stable solid. The handling conventions in our storage guide apply. They are conventions carried across from peptides generally rather than published stability data for this compound, and we say so rather than implying a study exists.
Reconstituted in bacteriostatic water, the limiting figure is microbiological rather than chemical: the benzyl alcohol preservative is validated for 28 days. In practice that rarely binds here — at whole-milligram daily doses a 10 mg vial is finished long before 28 days. Our FAQs explain where the figure comes from.
Do not freeze a reconstituted solution. Freezing concentrates solutes at the ice front and drives aggregation, and aggregation is specifically what the FDA flagged for this compound. The damage does not show in the vial.
Reported effects
There is no human adverse event dataset for synthetic Epitalon, no toxicology package, no LD50 and no Phase 1 study. The reassuring human safety statements in circulation — "no severe adverse events over three years" — come from the Epithalamin trials, and inherit the same substitution problem as the dosing.
The animal data, which is reassuring
Anisimov and colleagues gave Epitalon subcutaneously to 54 female mice per group, five consecutive days every month from three months old until natural death. There was no effect on mean lifespan, a 12–13% increase in maximum lifespan and in the lifespan of the longest-lived tenth, and no increase in total spontaneous tumour incidence. Leukaemia development was reduced roughly six-fold.
The oncology question, which is open and does not point the same way
A compound whose selling point is telomerase activation raises an obvious question, because telomerase reactivation is one of the things cancer cells do. That question has been asked directly exactly once, by the independent Brunel group in 2025, and the answer was not clean:
- Epitalon lengthened telomeres in breast cancer cell lines as well as in normal fibroblasts
- It upregulated the telomerase catalytic subunit roughly twelve-fold at 1 mcg/mL
- It increased alternative lengthening of telomeres activity — a telomerase-independent mechanism cancers use — about ten-fold in one line
Those authors concluded Epitalon "can be safely used in healthy individuals." That conclusion does not follow from two-dimensional cell culture, and it appears in the paper whose result figures required a published correction. We are reporting the experiment and declining the conclusion.
No in-vivo or human study has examined whether any of this matters. The mouse work found no excess tumours, which is genuinely encouraging; the cell work found the mechanism operating in cancer lines, which is genuinely not. Both are true. Anyone with a current or suspected malignancy should treat this as an unanswered question rather than a settled one.
Regulatory status
Approval. Epitalon is not approved anywhere in the world.
The extract, for completeness. Epithalamin was approved for medical use in the USSR by Ministry of Health Order No. 250 of 19 June 1990, registration 90.250.1. We could not independently verify its current status in the Russian Federation and are not going to assert one. It has never been approved outside Russia.
United States. Epitalon appears on the FDA's list of bulk drug substances nominated but withdrawn — it was previously in category 2 of the interim compounding policies and the nomination was withdrawn by the nominator. The agency's stated rationale is still published, verbatim: compounded drugs containing epitalon "may pose risk for immunogenicity for certain routes of administration due to the potential for aggregation and peptide-related impurities," and FDA "lacks sufficient information to know whether the drug would cause harm if administered to humans." Withdrawal by a nominator is not a safety clearance, and we would rather spell that out than let the word "withdrawn" do misleading work.
United States — and this changed in July 2026. FDA re-opened the question. On 23 and 24 July 2026 its Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee reviewed seven peptides — BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, DSIP, Semax and Epitalon — under docket FDA-2025-N-6895. FDA's own stated position going into the meeting was that none of the seven should be added to the 503A bulks list. Legal commentators reporting from the meeting record the committee voting the other way on six of the seven, Epitalon among them.
A committee recommendation is advice. FDA is not bound by it, formal rulemaking has not happened, and nothing about the legal status of this compound has changed — in the United States or here. We are recording it because the picture is moving and you will see it reported as though it had already landed.
Canada. Health Canada's public advisory of 9 April 2026 names Epitalon among fourteen peptides sold online, states that peptides are generally regulated as prescription drugs in Canada, and states that research-use-only labelling "does not make these products legal or exempt from regulatory requirements." It is not a controlled substance under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The advisory is linked below and is worth reading directly.
Sport. Epitalon is not named on the 2026 WADA Prohibited List — we read the list and checked. It is nonetheless caught by section S0, which prohibits at all times "any pharmacological substance which is not addressed by any of the subsequent sections of the List and with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use." Epitalon has no such approval anywhere, so it falls inside S0 by definition. An athlete should treat it as prohibited, and anyone telling you it is not on the list is telling you something true and useless.
Sentient Biogenix supplies Epitalon for laboratory research use only. It is not for human or veterinary use.
Questions we actually get
Didn't a trial show it cut mortality in half?
A trial showed that for Epithalamin, a crude extract of bovine pineal glands, registered as a medicine in the USSR in 1990. It was a real trial — 266 people, double-blind, placebo-controlled, six to eight years. It did not use this compound, and no study has ever connected the two by dose or by pharmacokinetics.
Does it lengthen telomeres?
In cell culture, yes — originally in human fetal fibroblasts, and now independently replicated across several human cell lines. In a living human being, nobody has measured it. Those are different claims and the gap between them is the whole question.
Where does the 10-day course come from?
From the Epithalamin injection schedules used in the Russian trials. It was carried across to Epitalon on the basis of the names being similar. No course length has ever been tested for this peptide.
How many vials does a course take?
At 5 mg a day, a 10 mg vial is two days — so a twenty-day run is ten vials. That is the arithmetic most people get wrong, and it is why we built the supply planner. Put in whatever protocol you are actually following and it will tell you before you start rather than halfway through.
Is it safe?
Unknown, honestly. The mouse data found no excess tumours over a lifetime. The one independent cell study found the telomere mechanism working in breast cancer lines. There is no human safety dataset for the synthetic peptide at all. Anyone who tells you it is proven safe is telling you about the extract, or about mice, or about nothing.
References
- Khavinson VKh, Morozov VG. Peptides of pineal gland and thymus prolong human life. Neuro Endocrinology Letters 2003;24(3–4):233–40. nel.edu — the 266-patient trials, the mortality figures, the dosing schedules, and the definition of Epithalamin as a pineal gland extract.
- Khavinson VKh, Bondarev IE, Butyugov AA. Epithalon peptide induces telomerase activity and telomere elongation in human somatic cells. Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine 2003;135:590–92. link.springer.com — human fetal fibroblasts, in vitro.
- Al-dulaimi S, Thomas R, Matta S, Roberts T. Epitalon increases telomere length in human cell lines through telomerase upregulation or ALT activity. Biogerontology 2025;26:178. bura.brunel.ac.uk — the first independent replication, the breast cancer cell line results, and the ALT finding. See also the published correction to Figures 1, 2 and 3: link.springer.com
- Anisimov VN, Khavinson VKh, et al. Effect of Epitalon on biomarkers of aging, life span and spontaneous tumor incidence in female Swiss-derived SHR mice. Biogerontology 2003;4(4):193–202. link.springer.com — 54 mice per group, no effect on mean lifespan, no increase in tumour incidence.
- Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, Cognitive Vitality. Epithalamin and Epithalon. alzdiscovery.org — the extract-versus-peptide definition, and the absence of independent confirmation.
- US Food and Drug Administration. Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks. fda.gov — the Epitalon row, in the nominated-but-withdrawn table, and its verbatim safety rationale.
- Health Canada. Think twice before injecting peptides bought online: unauthorized products can seriously harm you. Public advisory, 9 April 2026. recalls-rappels.canada.ca
- World Anti-Doping Agency. The 2026 Prohibited List, in force 1 January 2026, section S0 — non-approved substances. Read via the Austrian Federal Law Gazette's official reproduction (BGBl. III Nr. 219/2025) because WADA blocks automated access to its own copy.
Several sources could not be opened and nothing has been printed from them: the full text of the 2003 telomerase paper, the methods of the 2002 retinitis pigmentosa report, and the sample size of the melatonin work. Where a figure could not be verified, this page leaves it out rather than repeating it.
For laboratory research use only. Not for human or veterinary use. Nothing on this page is dosing guidance, and no figure here should be read as a recommendation.